T_281
The work as shown. Every value below comes from vae.db, the master database of the Crucible Year.
Recorded
- Date
- 2026.05.07, day 130
- Size
- 97 × 180 cm
- Paper
- S12, Red Star Mo She Special Effect Xieyi, half-raw
- Inks
- MB4, MB5, MB6
- Phase
- P2 The Switch
- Shown on the site
- yes (V23 rating of 5.0 or higher)
- Early storage triage
- SA: save, archive (Peter's early system, since retired)
Measured · V23 (v23.8)
- V23 rating
- 6.2
- Form
- 2.4
- Tonal depth
- 2
- Layering
- 3
- Composition
- 2
- Material and surface
- 1
- Ink cover
- 74%
- Dark share
- 15%
- Tonal steps
- 4
- Flaws named by the reads
- tide line 1, other 10, water stain 4, bloom 2
Older engine
- V7
- 4
How the number was made
Read by the Visual Analysis Engine, version 23.8, on 2026.10.06: measured by code, then read 5 times by Claude Opus 5.5 against three reference paintings (R1 to R3), each read independent of the others. How the engine works.
Three views of one sheet.
Left, the photograph. Centre, the tone stretch the model is shown beside it: the darkest 45% of tones spread over the whole range, so flat black, banding and stains show. Right, every pixel as the measuring code classes it: cyan black ink, deep teal translucent grey, stone the palest ink, near black bare paper.
4 families of tone.
Every inked pixel's brightness in 64 bins, smoothed; each circled peak holds at least 4% of the ink. Life inside the black: 0.044 (under 0.045 reads as flat).
Five reads, agreeing on 4 of 5 qualities.
Each quality placed on its ladder by each read, and the mean the engine keeps. Where reads differ, they differ by one rung; close calls resolve down.
READ 1, IN ITS OWN WORDS
“A fluent spiral of nested translucent arcs closing on a dry-brush black core, similar in type to R3. It is let down by a flat black interior and the hard-edged runs and drips at bottom-left.”
All principal arcs follow the brush's circular travel; black core and grey bands are fluent. The squared terminal of the dark arc at centre is slightly blocky.
WEAKEST Squared blunt end of the black core arc
STRONGEST Dry-brush black arc sweeping round the right
Grey bands and dry-brush right arc are modelled with streaks and grain. The black core near centre is flat inside; dark interior modulation 0.044 is below the threshold.
WEAKEST Flat dense black at the core arc's end
STRONGEST Streaked dry-brush greys in the right arc
Four tonal steps: pale outer arc, mid-grey arc, darker arc, black dry-brush core. The arcs overlap translucently, and their order reads clearly from the outside in.
WEAKEST Pale outermost arc barely separates from paper
STRONGEST Stepped translucent arcs nesting toward black core
The spiral sweeps from top left down into the white void at bottom centre, so the empty paper is shaped. The bottom-left drips and pale runs are a weak, untidy corner.
WEAKEST Drip-strewn bottom-left zone
STRONGEST Spiral carrying eye into shaped white centre
The dry-brush grain is used well, but tide-edged runs and drops hang from the left grey arc in the bottom-left. They are clearly visible in the colour view. Paper creases cross the upper right.
WEAKEST Runs and drops below left grey wash
STRONGEST Dry-brush splitting in the black arc
6 distinct places, 1 major.
Each read must name every flaw and where it is, in a ninth of the sheet. Here the reads named flaws in 6 distinct places, 17 mentions in all across 5 reads; the number in each ninth is how many times a flaw was named there. Reads agreeing on a place strengthen the evidence for one flaw; they do not multiply it. A major flaw holds Material and surface at rung 1.
Measured from the 16-bit master.
The previous engine (V22) measured this sheet's master file: 1 principal ink mass traced (cyan), 8 enclosed voids at true size in their grid cells (amber), the main gesture from start to end (red). Of 16 edge segments, 19% crisp, 63% soft or bloomed, 19% broken.
Tonal depth held at rung 1.
4 steps: not appliedMaterial held at rung 1. Mild waves in the unmounted paper are never a flaw.
5 major flaws: appliedThe rating cannot exceed 4.
lowest 1.0A read that breaks the reply format is discarded.
5 of 5 validV23 rating 6.2.
Engine v23.8, 5 reads. Fixed arithmetic, the same for every painting; the constants were set on 24 randomly chosen paintings so the median sheet scores 5. The scale is relative to this archive, not to painting in general, and a difference of less than half a point between two paintings is noise.